Historical national account data are often plagued by quality problems, and rivaling series imply different business cycle chronologies. This problem is particularly grave for Germany before World War I [Burhop, C., Wolff, G.B., 2005. A compromise estimate of net national product and the business cycle in Germany 1851-1913. Journal of Economic History 65(3), 615-657]. We exploit the comovement between asset prices and various GNP estimates under the efficient market hypothesis to obtain an improved business cycle dating, and to decide between the various alternative national accounts series. We also examine the comovement between financial markets and various disaggregate indicators of real investment. Employing both time and frequency domain techniques, we find impressive comovement between the stock market, an estimate of the aggregate wage bill, and disaggregate evidence on real investment. Our findings confirm traditional business cycle chronologies for Germany and lead us to discard later, revisionist attempts to date the business cycle.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: